CRM software plays an important role in gathering key insights into customers, managing customer relationships, and delivering CRM analytics and data to build and nurture business growth. The most basic function of a CRM application is to collect, arrange and incorporate consumer data across various channels. But how do you add value to your business with the data at hand?

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The best way to understand this is to know what your business requirements are. The amount of data an analytical CRM application holds can be used as a goldmine to dig deeper every time customer and potential customer-related insights are needed. With the right product in place, your business will see benefits in many areas of operations — irrespective of company size or industry type.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• What is Analytical CRM?
• Benefits
• Leveraging CRM Analytics
• Measuring CRM Analytics
• Choosing the Right Analytical CRM
• Best Analytical CRM Applications

By 2029, the CRM industry is expected to reach $145.79 billion in revenue. Businesses use a CRM to be sure that the strategies they develop are based on relevant statistics, analyzed data and customer interest. Nevertheless, just like a fingerprint, every business is different and has a unique set of obstacles, goals and requirements. Each business demands a different method that makes determining the right CRM a battle in and of itself.

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What is Analytical CRM?

Analytical CRM is one of the main types of CRM. It combines the capabilities of a CRM with analytics to study customer behavior. It examines and creates a systematic evaluation of customer data using business intelligence, looks at past sales trends, current leads and opportunities, and identifies patterns in a customer’s purchase behavior. This data can be used for sales forecasting, predicting trends, understanding the speed and geographical location of how leads will develop, and more.

Analytical CRM is the perfect blend of data and intelligence that can be used to drive and elevate sales. Lead-driven businesses can use the wealth of sales data they have to forecast sales, determine the correct interests of buyers, provide suitable sales strategies and more.

In contrast to analytical CRM, operational CRM directly manages relations. It also streamlines workflows and processes across the organizational structure.

Collaborative CRM takes care of routine tasks through automation and streamlines back-office processes, customer interactions and communication within the company.

Primary Benefits

Fusing Data and Intelligence

For a company’s growth strategy to be successful, it is important to effectively understand customer behavior and their responsiveness to your products or services. This gives insight into various factors such as customer life cycle, risk factors, profitability, customer loyalty and market segmentation.

With analytical CRM in place, you get the best of both — data and intelligence to power your business strategies. While sales and marketing increase your ROI, backing it up with data and intelligence can provide direction to your efforts, maximizing growth.

Sales Analysis

Sales analysis provides a detailed summary of your sales, including but not limited to sales by channel, organization, product, category, group and more. It also lists sales by region, season, cross-selling, up-selling, demographics and other important factors. All of this information offers an integrated perspective of sales so you can understand the underlying patterns and trends appearing in the data.

Customer Profile Analysis

Analytical CRM offers comprehensive analysis by providing information about mass customers and prospects through segmentation. This further helps in developing marketing strategies based on customer segmentation, making it easier to target prospective customers.

Understanding the customer also offers more scope for one-on-one marketing. Additionally, it helps you capture and divide customers based on frequency of purchase, product utilization, and demographic, psychographic and geographic.

Campaign Analysis

Being able to analyze customer behavior and responses gives an upper hand in understanding the customer’s interest and transition. This data can assist in altering marketing and sales campaigns giving useful insights for optimum use of resources. Additionally, it provides the capability to measure the efforts and output of individual campaigns, the effectiveness of media and cost-benefit analysis. Analytical CRM adds purpose and control to campaign efforts through campaign analysis.

Loyalty Analysis

The key profit of any business lies in customer loyalty, which can be measured and worked upon through thorough campaign and customer analysis. Loyalty analysis measures the duration of customer relationships, products and services utilized, frequency of purchase and offers a suitable customer retention program. Campaign, customer and loyalty analysis combined can be utilized to add value to sales by influencing brand loyalty.

Profitability Analysis

Every business needs to determine pricing, evaluate offers and discounts, allocate resources and derive the ROI. All of this needs a thorough study of input through resources, manual efforts and monetary investments. Analytical CRM helps calculate and explore all inputs with the help of profitability analysis.

Analytical CRM assists in understanding and acting upon the essential factors that contribute to amplifying sales. While the above listed are a few key benefits of an analytical CRM, there are plenty more ways it can improve sales and marketing efforts.

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Leveraging CRM Analytics

It is very well known that conversions require more than just a message since customer loyalty and brand recall both require business establishment in the minds of customers. The best way to achieve either of these is by knowing your customers: where they are, who they are and what exactly they are looking for.

Every CRM offers a set of specific functionalities that can help your business. One such functionality is providing data and analytics. Analytics is the ground for converting prospects into leads the smart way, which can further be converted to brand advocates. CRM analytics provides in-depth data about customers, making it easy to implement sales and marketing strategies.

How do you use this data to the best of its capability to make the most for your business? Here are a few examples of how to use CRM analytics for your business.

Customer Journey

Customer journeys tend to differ based on the kind of purchase. Large or bulk purchases take a significantly longer time than impulsive purchases. For instance, when a company purchases software, the decision can take months and include identifying needs, comparing products, gathering requirements, shortlisting vendors, buying and then brand loyalty. In such cases, the transition of a customer purchase takes longer than a quick individual purchase.

When dealing with an extensive process like this, an ideal CRM analytics platform will study the customer journey, identify the buying signals and track the key metrics for a business to understand the needs of the prospect. This data lets you analyze customer patterns and requirements to improve the process for selling and nurturing customer relationships.

Lead Status

CRM analytics provides key indicators of a buyer’s journey to point out the desire or disinterest in purchasing your product or service. Customer transactions mirror customer interest levels, as customer behavior often reflects their interest levels and consequently tells a story about how soon they might make a purchase.

Key indicators are gathered from website visits, touchpoints, social media engagements, forms filled, webinars or events attended and more. Independently these indicators might not help, but with CRM analytics, it becomes possible to identify and target customers. Such data also helps track frequency and loyalty elements.

Customer Relation Strategy

CRM analytics identifies positive and negative inputs based on customer interactions. Metrics like open cases, inbound and outbound calls and conversation subjects help determine user sentiments. Based on these parameters, businesses can help resolve issues and address concerns.

Based on the user sentiment, you can offer a customer-centric solution to help build and maintain brand loyalty. This analysis also helps you improvise problem areas such as customer service, response time, follow-ups, cross-selling and upselling services and more.

Predictive Analysis

Data and analysis through CRM analytics can not only help address current business issues but can also help draw a predictive model. You can use data to understand patterns in buying, complaints, returns before purchases and other factors to come up with a predicted outcome. Using this data lets you develop probable strategies and forecasts for business growth. It offers a glimpse into the future by analyzing the results of a number of interactions, which is more insightful than comparing a few manually. The forecasting system or the predictive analysis helps predict the probability of outcomes and understand business strategies failed.

Customer Segmentation

Based on the analysis, you can divide customers into segments based on commonalities that best suit your business. This makes it easier to target, nurture and scale up by understanding customers and their common approach. These lists can be created based on actions, traits and outcome studies, which will help understand the target audience and improvise on inputs accordingly.

The key to growing your business is to start with ensuring you understand customer role, industry, purchasing history and support requests.

Automation and data have helped businesses understand and cater to customer needs in a much more effective way than was previously possible. Educating employees about new technologies and adopting automation has proved beneficial for business.

CRM analytics helps businesses understand the basics of customer response. Additionally, it provides scope for building, nurturing and establishing customer relationships. It can not only help grow a business through insightful sales and marketing but also develop sustainable business relationships with customers.

Web Analysis

CRM analytics lets you gather data from company websites to convert it into actionable insights. Capturing customer activity directly within CRM provides crucial metrics like click-through and bounce rates and time spent on a particular page.

Reporting

Use data gathered via CRM analytics tracking to run several reports on sales forecasting, sales cycles, sales conversion, sales pipeline and goal comparison.

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Measuring CRM Analytics

CRM software enables you to measure a plethora of metrics to help maximize sales efficiency. It provides visibility into:

Pre-sale CRM Analytics

• Prospects: Sales teams are always on the lookout for new prospects. Analyzing the prospect identification process helps you see what your sales reps are doing right and areas they need to improve.
• Lead Quality: Leads are practically the bread and butter of your sales department. Sales teams spend the majority of their time phoning in leads and sending proposals. Tracking these activities gives you an idea of how well the leads convert into customers.
• Engagement: Monitoring interactions with clients across all channels helps make data-driven decisions. You can measure email performance for every email sequence to optimize outreach. Information like website visitors, survey respondents and newsletter sign-ups also helps personalize communications.

Post-sale CRM Analytics

• Support Quality: Monitoring issues raised by clients allows you to identify persisting chinks in your armor. With fewer issues and speedy redressal, customers are more likely to stay with you.
• Segmentation:Post-sales, you can categorize customers based on predetermined variables. Leverage segmentation to identify customers who are likely to make a repeat purchase or buy additional products.

Choosing the Right Analytical CRM

Selecting a business-specific analytical CRM application requires careful thought and consideration. In the end, it boils down to a few critical factors that can sway you in the right direction:

• Flexibility: Out-of-the-box analytical CRMs might not cater precisely to your needs. Flexible CRMs allow you to customize and scale the system based on your requirements.
• Usability: Adopting a new system means dedicating a chunk of your time to training the workforce. CRMs with a friendly user interface, intuitive capabilities and built-in tutorials are more likely to smoothen the onboarding process.
• Data Capacity: It’s imperative to ensure that the analytical CRM of your choice can gather, process and store tons of digital data. Cloud storage not only ensures security but also makes it easier to monitor and access files and documents.
• Integration: An analytical CRM that doesn’t connect with your existing apps hinders workflows and productivity. Make sure the platform seamlessly integrates with your legacy systems.
• Visualization: CRMs with built-in data visualization tools like interactive charts, graphs and dashboards help make sense of the data at hand.

Best Analytical CRM Applications

We’ve listed the top analytical CRM applications based on our research and insights to help kickstart your search:

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Salesforce Sales Cloud

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a standalone product that helps companies of all sizes drive digital transformation with the perfect CRM capabilities. It helps businesses connect with customers, provides sales forecasts and transforms the buying experience. It empowers businesses to manage leads, track progress and automate sales processes to help sales professionals close more deals.

Top Benefits

• AI-Powered CRM Assistant: Einstein, an AI-enabled CRM assistant, lets you analyze customer interactions to identify business patterns and trends, as well as predict the right channels, content, products and messaging for sales leads and opportunities. You can create models for behavior prediction and receive actionable steps within Salesforce by combining AI predictions or by creating external business rules, automating workflows by capturing and logging critical customer data, and resolving support cases using AI chatbots.
• Sales Forecasting: Gain a real-time view of the entire team’s forecast, adjustments and entire pipeline to aid business decisions. Additionally, it tracks sales performance with a real-time leaderboard. With Overlay Splits, it allows businesses to credit the right amounts to sales overlays based on revenue, contract value and many other factors.

Primary Features

• Analytics Reports and Dashboards: The solution offers team performance tracking, customer analytics, preconfigured dashboards for different user types, and standard and custom reports. Dashboards refresh automatically so you always have the latest data at hand.
• Charts: Sales Cloud supports different types of charts such as comparison, trending, relationship, compositions, distribution, metrics, location, pipeline and more.
• Sales Analytics: Cloud-based analytics provides intuitive visualizations, prebuilt dashboards, lenses and datasets to accelerate data exploration. A configuration wizard allows the app to reflect data based on company viewing preferences and offers the inclusion of team quotas that are accessible on any compatible device.
• Email Tracking: You can stay updated by syncing and tracking contacts, events and tasks. Also facilitates sales professionals to stay updated by capturing new email leads and adding them directly to the CRM dashboard.

Free trial: 14 days.

Free plan: No.

Limitations

• Doesn’t support external data sources, except CSV files.
• Doesn’t permit multiple roles access.

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Pipedrive

Pipedrive offers sales solutions with additional features of a CRM. It helps prioritize deals, track performance and predict revenue for business growth. It allows you to manage leads, deals, track communications, automate the work process and more. Other features include insights, reports and customizable data fields.

Top Benefits

• Sales Forecast: View the company’s performance through live dashboards and revenue forecasting reports. You can fully customize the forecasting view and filter for products, date started, deal starter and other details.
• Sales Assistant: An AI-powered sales mentor helps users with personalized tips, behavior-based performance tips, automatic recommendations, notifications and report graphs that can be used to enhance sales.
• WebForms: You can create and customize web forms for collecting names, email addresses, phone numbers and other details that get delivered directly into the pipeline along with incoming lead notifications. The collected information can be used to target customers through websites, email databases and social media.

Primary Features

• Google Analytics Integration: Analytics derive reports that help identify factors such as lead qualifying factors, traffic sources that drive the most closed opportunities, location and device of best leads available and automatically imported data into the CRM dashboard.
• Reports and Filters: You can view pipeline metrics such as the number of new deals, the average age of deals, number of open deals and stages of conversion for all deals – in any time period. It applies custom filters to reports based on data requirements and helps create, customize and filter visual sales dashboards for tracking goals.
• Pipeline Metrics: A statistical tool shows the health of a pipeline and stages that need improvement. Relevant filters grant access to in-depth and personalized analysis of the sales pipeline along with a customizable drag-and-drop interface.
• Visual Metrics: Visual reports offer charts and tables to monitor team performance, compare individual results, identify opportunities for improvement and master statistics like conversion rates and more.

Free trial: 14 days.
Free plan: No. However, the free trial allows access to full API and integrations but does not allow instant autoresponders to be sent when using the API.

Limitations

• Doesn’t offer lead scoring out of the box.
• Doesn’t support tracking bulk email opens and clicks.
• Doesn’t support scheduling reports and dashboards.

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Oracle CX Sales

Oracle CX Sales is a suite product of Oracle that guides sellers with intelligent recommendations, machine learning-based CRM capabilities, complete customer data and more. It assists in building better sales plans with critical data and provides intelligence from the back office, CRM applications, third-party data layers and real-time market signals. The recommendations guide and prescribe the best course of action for sales professionals.

Other capabilities include sales force automation, sales planning, sales performance management, customer data management, DataFox data management and more. There are mobile apps with responsive designs for both Android and iOS devices.

Top Benefits

• AI-Enabled Data Engine: DataFox, an AI-enabled data engine, lets you find and prioritize target companies, leverage AI and machine learning, and automate data collection through natural language processing. It also provides firmographic data points, signals, filters, company scoring models and balanced territories. It can scan over 5 million digital properties and create over 70 firmographic data points and 68 types of real-time company signals.
• Adaptive Intelligence: The system provides AI and data-driven apps to identify opportunities with the highest win probabilities. The apps offer capabilities like probability scores, automated recommendations for next-best actions, deal acceleration, AI-derived firmographic data, signals for account enrichment and account scoring for account prioritization.

Primary Features

• Predictive Analytics: This feature lets managers and sales teams create tailored products and promotions specific to customer needs.
• Scheduled Analytics: Helps submit reports as scheduled processes and sets up agents to email analytics, briefing books and dashboards.
• Mobile Analytics: Sales professionals can access analytics and reports through the homepage of a mobile device. Analytics are embedded contextually for accounts and include data factors such as sales account revenue, trends, sales account win/loss trends and sales account win/loss reasons.
• Real-Time Reporting: This feature offers up-to-date data insights through reports and analytics in every individual’s work area. You can explore predefined analyses as well as create and edit analyses from the work area.

Free trial: 30 days.
Free plan: Yes. Also provides a year-long free AWS service.

Limitations

• Doesn’t support navigating to a sales object’s details page after selecting the sales object from a ‘Dynamic Choice List’.
• Doesn’t support a standard object subtab on a custom object mobile details page.

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Dynamics 365 for Sales

Dynamics 365 Sales is a standalone product that’s part of the larger Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite. It manages sales productivity and marketing effectiveness with social insights, business intelligence and campaign management. Designed for all business sizes, it helps reduce costs and increase profitability by organizing and automating business processes. It empowers businesses for smarter selling with contextual AI, allows sellers to build relationships and improves sales performance. Cloud and on-premise deployment options are available.

Sales teams can build buyer journeys for sellers to prioritize customers and activities, effective communication techniques and multichannel engagement. Sales managers can plan and forecast, with real-time visibility. Additionally, sales operations can create specific roles, customized AI and a configurable sales process.

Top Benefits

• Power BI Integration: You can identify opportunities on a single dashboard, analyze the pipeline and view sales across metrics. The integration connects you to hundreds of data sources like Excel spreadsheets, on-premise data sources, big data, streaming data, cloud services and more. Insights include key metrics with out-of-the-box workbooks, case analysis by type, priority and geography, and service performance on the number of cases, resolution rate, level of priority and more.
• AI-Driven Sales Insight Assistant: This feature monitors daily actions and communications to generate a collection of insight cards and provide tailored and actionable insights. You can receive reminders of upcoming activities, along with email messages and alerts when an opportunity is nearing the close date, or when a contact or account has been inactive for a set amount of time.
• Mobile Analytics: The mobile app offers capabilities such as dashboards, forms, charts, notes creation, relationship assistant, offline sync and data export.

Primary Features

• Interactive Dashboards: These configurable, role-based dashboards provide an overview of actionable business data, letting you view, list and create charts — all in one place. They come in both — single and multi-stream formats. Multi-stream dashboards are preloaded partially with entity-specific configuration details. Flexible dashboard formats provide multiple ways to view data and contain interactive charts that offer relevant record counts. You can also export and then import dashboards into a different environment.
• Relationship Analytics: Integration with LinkedIn Sales Navigator provides recommendations based on customer interaction data through LinkedIn. This lets you see profiles, insights and related leads. You can collaborate on and personalize sales documents with embedded Office 365 tools. The sales engagement combines customer data with survey insights from Microsoft Forms Pro.
• Predictive Forecasting: Observe sales and estimate revenue at the organization level based on the team member’s probability of closing a deal. AI-enabled predictive forecasting helps you leverage both historical and pipeline data that combines subjective, bottom-up projections with objective, data-driven forecasts.

Free trial: Yes.
Free plan: No.

Limitations

• Doesn’t provide native integration with Gmail.
• Doesn’t support web browsers on a smartphone to run model-driven apps.
• Doesn’t support data import back after being exported in excel format.

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Pega Sales Automation

Pega Sales Automation is an AI-powered, intelligent sales automation solution that optimizes sales performance, anticipates customer needs and simplifies core sales processes. It uses AI to identify hidden revenue and provides your business with a 360-degree customer view, real-time sales forecasts and more.

You can develop mobile apps through Pega’s low-code application development platform, which works well for both Android and iOS users. The mobile app functions in online and offline mode. The platform also offers smart knowledge management, lead management and opportunity management.

Top Benefits

• AI Sales Coach: The platform uses AI to evaluate seller performance, analyzes more than 50 distinct actions, alerts managers about underperforming sellers and generates real-time coaching tips to help initiate, progress and close more deals. The dashboard offers an at-a-glance view into the entire team’s performance and tracks each member’s progress. You can also gain insight into the likelihood of success for new sellers via predictive analytics, enabling faster reactions to low performance.
• Sales Forecasting: Use real-time forecasting through direct channels, representatives and agents to support complex B2B and B2C sales processes. The forecast segregates the sales pipeline by category, quarter and territory on all devices. An audit allows you to track recent changes and the time and reason for an adjusted forecast.
• Pega Future Cast: Predicts revenue performance by comparing pipelines, historical accuracy, actual revenue, forecasted revenue and other predictors. It also shows an estimated quota attainment for the quarter and recommends goal settings.
• AI-Based Lead Ranking: The application integrates 19 predictors that help with lead, contact, organization and sales representative data, enabling individuals to prioritize lead qualification and follow-ups.

Primary Features

• Dashboard and Reporting: More than 40 out-of-the-box dashboards are available to track top opportunities, top leads, conversion rates, win/loss analysis, quota status, opportunities by product and more. This allows representatives, executives and managers to follow registered opportunities and deals that have changed. Dashboards can be synced to iOS or Android devices. The sales dashboard gives a cross-team view with the ability to drill into pipelines, leaderboards, sales goals, opportunities by competitors, reminders and more.
• Charts: Data such as customer activities, email activities, website logins, subscriptions and more is accessible in charts. Using this information lets you track team goal attainment and performance.
• Integration with LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Target, understand and engage potential buyers, find new leads, stay up-to-date via embedded profiles, and grow contacts and opportunities with prospective accounts.

Free trial: 30 days.
Free plan: No.

Limitations

• The marketplace for partner-developed add-ons is limited.
• Lacks plug-ins for integrating with third-party marketing automation tools and incentive management BI tools.

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In Conclusion

With the amount of data available today, CRM analytics plays a critical role in helping you use that information effectively. The combination of data and intelligence can provide insights into the customer journey, business processes, input and outcome of investments, and a lot more. This empowers you to prepare for the future with forecasts and improvise inputs for better results, which lets you predict, scale and optimize customer relations and profitability by increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Using an analytical CRM will give you tools like dashboards, reports, forecasting and AI to optimize your efforts. Grab our free comparison report to see which products have the strongest analytics capabilities, and start on your journey to putting your data to work. Your customers – and your business – will thank you.

Which analytical CRM application do you use for your business? Does your current CRM align with your business goals? Let us know in the comments!